


A Life By Any Other Name

by FeathersMcStrange



Series: Bones In The Ground (Suits/Leverage) [2]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Family History, Family Secrets, Gen, Names, Scars, Vulnerability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-05-12
Packaged: 2018-03-30 07:19:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3927859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeathersMcStrange/pseuds/FeathersMcStrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After finding out about and meeting the brother Eliot has been keeping a secret from them the whole time, Parker and Hardison sit on a roof with their friend, and listen to him talk about the people he used to be, once upon a time.</p><p>It all comes down to one question.</p><p>"What was your name?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Life By Any Other Name

**Author's Note:**

> 2/10 of my dialogue prompts, with the challenge of using five lines of dialogue, selected by a randomizer from a list of lines submitted by my followers on Tumblr. Set in my Suits/Leverage crossover verse but all you need to know from that is that Eliot has a brother named Harvey, and he has changed his name.
> 
> Dialogue lines: “like pins and needles?”, “where did you get that scar?”, “i replaced you, and you’ve replaced me. just leave!”, “yeah but where can we find food at 2 am on a saturday besides denny’s?”, “your ridiculous dictionaries are covering the floor!”
> 
> Prompt: His name was Will, as in Willpower. He’d given it to himself. (suddenlyprompts)

“I don’t know where to start.”

The night-time summer air is warm and dry, where the three of them sit on the roof of the building. The wind is gentle enough that it does not howl, but strong enough to rustle clothing and disturb hair. Parker and Alec bracket him. Above them, stars twinkle in the clearest sky Eliot has ever seen.

“You don’t have to do this.” Alec sounds steady, his voice even. He doesn’t look at Eliot, keeps his chin tilted back and his warm brown eyes scanning the heavens. “We understand. It’s okay.”

“I know. And that’s exactly why I have to.”

Silence descends for a few more moments while Parker shifts around, trying to get comfortable against the waist high brick ledge ringing the roof.

Whooshing the breath from his lungs in a heavy sigh, Eliot shakes his head. “It feels strange, talking about this. Like I’ve been sitting on it so long it’s gone numb, and now it’s all woken up again and it feels… Odd. It feels…”

“Like pins and needles?”

It makes sense in a weird sort of way that only Parker can pull off.

“I have no idea where to start.”

“Well,” she says, pulling her hood over her hair and settling back, “why not start at the beginning. Start simple. What was your name.”

He is not oblivious. He knows that this is not a question of the name Nate calls to get his attention, not the one Sophie snaps in irritation.

What  _was_  your name. The answer catches and sticks in his throat.  _Marcus_ , he thinks, and it should not be this hard to say. It is only a name, and after all, everybody knows that words cannot hurt you. They certainly cannot hurt you like this, like someone has dug shards of glass into his chest and started to twist, ripping out the pieces of a deep rooted, agony shrouded past. Pieces he had buried for a laundry list of reasons.

“Smaller then,” Alec says, and though he does not understand the power of an old name quite in the way Parker does, he knows Eliot and he is above all a compassionate man. He knows pain when he sees it. He nudges Eliot’s hand with his, gestures at the long, pink-white scar that traverses it.

“Where did you get that scar?”

That one is easy. “Canada. It’s a long story. Kind of boring.”

Eliot rubs the old would absently, recalling who he had been when he’d gotten it. At the time, his hair had been short, and he’d worn his knuckles taped constantly. His name was Will, as in Willpower. He’d given it to himself. It was his first new beginning. Will was dead in months.

Marcus. Will. Aaron. Lucas. Ryan. Noah. Eliot.

Names. He has had seven of them, and none have meant so much as the first and the last. None have meant anything at all, save the first and the last.

Marcus and Eliot. It was becoming more and more difficult to tell the difference.

Remembering the thing that started it all, waking in a park in New York City with no idea how he got there, seeing his older brother for the first time in three years, Harvey calling his team to come and get him because he said the only way he could help was to call those that actually could.

He has dreamed that first interaction over and over again, felt that desperate, fierce embrace and seen the fire in those eyes.

There are nights when Harvey’s hands tighten around his bruised neck and choke the last of the life out of him, finishing whatever it was that had been started during those lost days. There are nights when he can’t find his voice, and he stares at his brother in silence that creeps on forever. There are nights when Harvey shouts at him.

_“I replaced you, and you’ve replaced me. Just leave!”_

Most nights he wakes and does not remember, and stares at the ceiling until his own skin feels too tight and he leaps from bed as if it’s burnt him and goes for a walk, wandering around the city and just willing someone to try and pick a fight with him. Inward fury will cause him to self destruct if not directed out, and when he sits with the others, lip split and knuckles bloodied, they look with concern but do not ask. Eliot is grateful at least for that.

“Well, we’ve got time. I say we head to the Denny’s down the road and you can tell us that long story about Canada, eh?” Parker grins at him, and Alec laughs outright.

“Denny’s? Really Parker?”

“Yeah, but where can we find food at 2 am on a Saturday besides Denny’s?”

“Touché. Hey, where are you going? Fire escape? Really? You can just go through the window like we came out.”

“Your ridiculous dictionaries are covering the floor! We go in the window and we’ll step all over them. Besides. Fire escapes are fun.”

“Encyclopedias. They’re encyclopedias. And for your information they are not  _covering the floor_ , there is merely a small stack that got knocked over when Mr. I Bulldoze Through Everything Like I’m Trying To Clearcut A Small Forest climbed out.”

The bickering continues. Eliot closes his eyes, and grips the love welling in him tight, holds onto that feeling and hopes it never leaves him. He does not know what good deeds he has done in his life to deserve these two, but he hopes selfishly that nobody ever notices the karmic imbalance of someone like him not deserving people like them in the slightest.

As they climb down ahead of him, he thinks about the question. 'What was your name?’ Eliot. Eliot is his name now, and maybe it always has been. It was given to him a long time ago.

Their parents had let Harvey pick his middle name.

He thinks to his birth certificate, to the proof that the life he had left behind when he was sixteen had ever existed at all. Eighteen letters documenting his presence on the planet. Eighteen letters that had caused his brother so much pain, his brother who had named him.

It is no coincidence that he has settled down with Eliot, that he bears an anvil the shape and weight of those three syllables on his chest, crushing the breath out of him, wherever he goes. Eliot is a punishment and a reminder.

It is a punishment for the pain he has inflicted on the man whose family he has destroyed upwards of three times.

It is a reminder that even so he has a place to come home to, and a face that will be achingly relieved to see him.

It isn’t fair, what he does to Harvey. He keeps doing it anyway.

With this thought in his mind, Eliot twists his hands together and forces himself to look over at Parker and Alec. They must have seen the documents when they were doing background on Harvey, when he’d called them to come and get Eliot from New York. They know what his name had been. The first one. And yet they ask anyway.

There is something about this that they understand. That this is something he has to give, not something they can take.

“My name was Marcus. Marcus Eliot Specter.”

The words leave his mouth and hang suspended in the air. They do not look away. Neither does he. Parker and Alec stand on the sidewalk a few feet below him and stare as if this is both the first time they have known him and the long awaited reunion of having missed him for decades. Parker mouths the name. There is a deep compassion in Alec’s eyes. They know what he has given them and they understand what it has taken from him to give it.

When they hold their hands out for him to (needlessly) grasp as he jumps the last couple of rungs, landing with a soft thud on the pavement, it feels like a promise.


End file.
